TOLUCA, Mexico -- President Barack Obama on Wednesday warned Ukraine’s government to show restraint as clashes escalated in the capital of Kiev, urging the Ukrainian military to avoid violence to quash protests.
Obama, who’d arrived earlier in Mexico’s industrial city of Toluca for a summit with the leaders of Canada and Mexico, also called on pro-Europe protesters in Ukraine to refrain from violence, which has taken 26 lives in the past two days.
“We’re going to be watching closely, and we expect the Ukrainian government to show restraint, to not resort to violence in dealing with peaceful protesters,” the president said. He also urged “peaceful protesters to remain peaceful.”
Obama made it clear that he thinks the majority of Ukrainians want to establish a closer relationship with Europe in defiance of Russia, which has held sway over Ukraine for centuries. The country is a key transit point for Russian natural gas exports to Europe.
Other administration officials voiced fears that the clashes in the streets of Kiev might worsen.
“As NATO’s military commander, I ask that responsible leaders avoid the use of military force against the people of Ukraine,” said Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Europe, said in a tweet.
Speaking aboard Air Force One en route to Mexico, National Security Council spokesman Ben Rhodes said the clashes unfolding in Kiev were “completely outrageous and have no place in the 21st century.”
Rhodes alerted Russia that the White House expects it to play a low-key role in Ukraine and allow its citizens to peacefully decide their own fate.
“We understand that Ukraine is a neighbor of Russia, has historic ties to Russia, but that that need not preclude Ukraine from, again, continuing to pursue a European path as well,” Rhodes said.
The violence in the Ukraine appeared to eclipse the early hours of the half-day summit, which brought together Obama, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
They were once dubbed the Three Amigos, but strains on their friendship have cast a chill over the world’s largest trading bloc.
A bilateral spat between Mexico and Canada and anger in Ottawa over U.S. indecision on whether to build the Keystone XL pipeline from western Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast cooled the atmosphere of the seven-hour summit.
Obama landed in Toluca, some 40 miles west of Mexico City, at about 12:10 p.m. local time (1:10 pm. EST). He popped his head through the door of Air Force One seven minutes later and bounded down the stairs.
Before boarding the plane at Joint Base Andrews for the four-hour flight, the White House said, the president signed an executive order that’s intended to reduce bureaucratic barriers and speed up imports and exports, helping businesses strengthen supply chains across borders. The move signaled that Obama wouldn’t cede to opposition to his trade agenda at home.
The gathering in Toluca, Mexico’s fifth largest city, coincides with the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which formed a market of 470 million people from Canada’s Yukon to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The bloc represents more than 30 percent of global economic output.
But even as manufacturing chains are more integrated among the three nations, experts say the bloc has drifted on autopilot with a lack of strategic vision.
“Twenty years later, it’s hard for us to talk to each other and reach agreement,” said Laura Macdonald, a political scientist who specializes in the region at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Rather than re-debate NAFTA, Obama is expected to press Pena Nieto and Harper to speak with one voice as they negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade bloc that includes 12 countries around the Pacific Rim.
Multiple tensions surround the summit, though, and it unfolds “at the worst moment in the trilateral relationship” since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States triggered concerns over border security, Macdonald said.
The bright spot is an energy revolution that’s altering the global energy map and shifting its epicenter to North America, revitalizing manufacturing.
“We are in a fundamentally different place than we were even five years ago,” said Eric Farnsworth, the vice president of the Council of the Americas, a Washington-based business group that promotes free trade, democracy and open markets in the hemisphere.
Farnsworth said bilateral issues and faltering political intentions had hindered efforts to develop the NAFTA region “in a comprehensive and strategic manner.”
“That sense of broader purpose here is missing,” he said.
Mexico is irked at Canada over visa requirements that have caused its tourism to Canada to drop by about 50 percent since 2008 to about 130,000 Mexicans per year. In contrast, 1.9 million Canadians visit Mexico annually.
Mexican diplomats say Canada requires 10 times more information from Mexican citizens to grant visas than the U.S. government does.
Harper and Pena Nieto oversaw the signing Tuesday of an expanded air transport accord that will allow more direct flights between Canada and Mexico, but Harper made no public mention of whether Canada would ease visa requirements.
Harper is irritated with Obama for U.S. delays on deciding whether to proceed with the $5.4 billion Keystone XL pipeline, designed to carry oil made from tar sands in the province of Alberta through the U.S. Midwest to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Macdonald said the pipeline project “is the most important foreign policy objective of the Harper government” in its quest to become an energy superpower.
“Some of the Harper government statements have had an air of petulance about them: ‘You just have to answer us now,’ ” Macdonald said.
Also irritating U.S.-Canada relations are delays in replacing the aged Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, the busiest international land border crossing in North America in terms of trade volume.
Even without coordinated policies to reinvigorate NAFTA, manufacturing supply chains increasingly bind the three nations. More than 8 million U.S. jobs depend on trade with Canada, and another 6 million on trade with Mexico.
U.S.-Mexico trade topped $500 billion last year, and components and finished products travel back and forth across the border. Vehicles built in North America are said to have their parts cross the U.S. borders eight times before they’re fully assembled.
“We design it together and we produce it together,” Farnsworth said of most goods, noting that 40 cents of each dollar’s worth of Mexican exports to the United States comes from materials and parts produced in U.S. plants.
Once-annual summits between the NAFTA leaders have grown less frequent. The leaders met in Guadalajara in 2009 and in Washington in 2012.
The initial promise of the NAFTA trade bloc led to the moniker the Three Amigos for the leaders of the countries, taken from a 1986 comedy Western starring Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short.
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